Vanity Sizing: The Visual Edition

The white-ish sparkly dress on the top is one my grandmother gave me when I was a little kid to play “princess dress up” in (it was a floor length gown when I was 5!). Someone set it aside for me after she died, and I found it this week while sorting through some boxes. I checked the tag out, and it’s marked as a size 14. The dress below it is a bridesmaids dress I wore about 6 years ago at my brothers wedding….also marked a size 14. I don’t know how long my grandmother had the top dress when she gave it to me in the 80s, but my guess is it’s from the late 70s. That’s 4 decades of size inflation right there folks.

If it followed this chart at all, the top dress would be a size 4 by today’s standards. The bottom dress would have been a size 20 in the late 70s.

My own vanity now compels me to mention that I don’t actually fit in the 2010 size 14 any more, I’m a 1987 size 14 thank-you-very-much.

If you don’t feel like clicking, the girls dress 14 is 32-26.5-34 and the women’s is 36-28-38.

Comparing that to the JCrew website (where the bottom dress is from) the modern girls size 14 is 33-26-33 and modern women’s size 14 is 40.5-33-43.

So basically you are completely correct…that dress in the picture is almost exactly a modern girls size 14, which is not actually that different from a 70s girls size 14, which was pretty close to a 1970s womens size 14, which is really different from a modern women’s size 14.